Motivational Quotes

Criticism

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Criticism

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

10.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

13.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

14.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

17.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

18.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

20.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

21.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

22.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

24.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

28.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

29.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

30.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

31.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

32.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

33.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

35.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

36.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

38.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

41.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

42.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

43.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

44.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

45.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

49.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

50.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.